


we have linens (we mainly want the things)

by unfinishedlines



Category: Community (TV)
Genre: Canon Character of Color, Canon Muslim Character, Casa Chez Trobed, Fluff and Humor, Gen, Gobi Nadir Is A Good Father, Gobi Nadir POV, Have some fluff to make up for all the hearts I broke with my other piece, IKEA, Just know that they are in love, M/M, Not the father-son relationship we got but the one we deserve, Set in Season 3, Troy Is A Good Son-In-Law, Troy and Abed Being Dumbasses, Troy and Abed going shoooooooping!, You can read it as Pre-Slash or Slash either works, no plot to speak of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-02
Updated: 2020-07-02
Packaged: 2021-03-03 23:02:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,882
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24993535
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unfinishedlines/pseuds/unfinishedlines
Summary: “Do you see it?” Troy whispered as he stared up at the light fixture.Abed nodded. “It’s the Death Star.”“No,” Gobi said, already knowing what they were thinking. “Abed, we agreed the only extra object we were getting were the recliners,” he said to his son, ignoring the confused look from the other.“It’s the Death Star,” Abed repeated, his face and voice strained just enough to seem pleading. “TheDeath Star, Baba.”Troy leaned out from his son’s side with his hands folded in prayer on his chest and his eyes brimming with tears.Gobi Nadir accompanies his son and his best friend on a trip to IKEA to get furnishings for their new apartment and gets much more than furniture out of the trip.
Relationships: Abed Nadir & Gobi Nadir, Troy Barnes/Abed Nadir
Comments: 17
Kudos: 135





	we have linens (we mainly want the things)

**Author's Note:**

> This was intended to be done for Father's Day, but clearly that didn't work out. I am not sure if there's any demand for stories where Gobi Nadir is a good dad, but a) Abed deserves it and b) I felt it would be a good contribution, so I decided to post it anyway. I also wanted my next Community fic to be fluff since my last one was so angsty and these boys deserve all the happiness in the world.
> 
> Please read, kudo, comment, and enjoy!

Gobi couldn’t believe this was happening, and, even more so, that it had been his idea in the first place. He stared at the staircase in front of him that his son and his best friend were stepping into. They were already bursting with energy and talking excitedly with each other. Why had he thought this could end well?

He got on the stairs and climbed up to the step below theirs. In his hand, Gobi had the dimensions of the rooms in his son’s new apartment and a list of the furnishings they had come to IKEA to buy. He knew Abed’s flights of fancy would easily overpower him in a store such as this and that his friend had as little impulse control as he. He had to keep them on task and make this as efficient and quick of a trip as he could.

Looking at their twinkling eyes when they reached the top of the stairs, however, Gobi’s hopes of that occurring dwindled. This would be a long, long trip.

“Man!” the boy squealed, taking a map and a stub of a pencil from the panel by the elevator. “White people really popped off with this place.”

Abed made a small noise of agreement as he reached out his hand. His friend reciprocated their handshake. Gobi sighed. His son had told him once they did their handshake whenever something “cool” happened. Was an assortment of furniture “cool”?

He was too old for this. His son’s generation made no sense.

“Boys,” he called. He picked up a complimentary blue bag from the bin in which they were stored and turned to face them. “We’ve got things to do.”

“Mr. Nadir,” the boy said, approaching him with outstretched arms. From the moment he met him during Greendale’s Family Day, Gobi noted everything about him was uncomfortably open. The fact held true years after that day. “Allow me.”

Gobi frowned at him and gripped the bag tighter in silent refusal. He could already picture him stuffing into it every other colorful object they came across, resulting in an overflowing bag and a never-ending bill. This would be a long trip—he’d made his peace with that fact on the stairs—but it did not need to be an expensive one. His wallet, which he had already volunteered despite Abed’s insistence, was not as large as his patience. “You handle the map. I’ll handle the purchases. What’s the first showroom?”

The boy squinted at the blue paper. “Living rooms,” he read out loud. They looked at the near horizon and found, indeed, various staged living rooms extending from the main grey walkway. Gobi consulted his list. A couch and chairs should be there if these Swedes were logical. The store came highly recommended, so he was willing to assume they were.

They forged onward. He walked behind the boys to ensure he could supervise them. Not that he didn’t trust them to behave, but he didn’t trust them to behave.

“Hey,” Abed said, pointing at the showrooms to their sides, “wanna pretend we live in these rooms?”

His friend’s grin widened. Gobi, up until now, had thought that was impossible. “Hell yeah!” he exclaimed. Abed pumped his fist and flashed him a small smile. 

He felt the need to impede—this was a total waste of their time that could only derail them—but the look on his son’s face dissolved his concerns. While they played pretend, he could track down pieces to show them. He couldn’t rob them from a little harmless fun, especially when it was convenient for him, too.

“Which one first?” the boy asked, looking around.

His son did not answer. He walked a little further ahead into a staged room with burgundy walls and sat on the caramel brown recliner set up in the corner nearest to the walkway. He closed his eyes, scrunched his face, and took a deep breath. When he opened his eyes, something about him seemed fundamentally different. “Ohoho, isn’t she, how you say, _magnifique_?” he asked in a French accent as he twirled an inexistent mustache and pointed at the picture hung across from him, a generic picture of a city street color-corrected so only the red parts of the picture stood out. 

The boy laughed as he sat on the side of the chair. He was about to continue their charade when his son’s raised hand stopped him. He seemed like himself again. “Wait, Troy. I actually like this chair. It’s cushioned in all the right places.”

“For real?” he replied as they wordlessly switched places. The boy sunk into the leather. “Oh, man, we _gotta_ get this.”

Abed looked down at him. “Cool. Cool, cool, cool. Movie marathons?”

Troy nodded. “Movie marathons.” Then, they did their handshake.

Gobi approached them with his list. He wouldn’t interrupt their game, but he would not buy useless furniture. “We’re not looking for recliners,” he stated.

“But Mr. Nadir, this one’s so _nice_ ,” the boy pleaded.

“We thought we’d use the couch to watch TV, but if we get the recliner, we can place the couch in the foyer by the kitchen,” Abed thought out loud. 

“You can’t both sit in the same chair.”

“We passed by one earlier that caught my eye,” Troy volunteered. Before either had time to react, he went off in the direction of the entrance. 

“Abed. A couch sits more than one person and costs less. No recliners,” Gobi said sternly. If he could convince his son, he would convince the other kid. 

He, however, shook his head. “It’s our apartment, and we want them.” After a moment of both standing in resolute silence, he added, “we’ll pay for them ourselves.”

“No need,” Gobi relented, “but this is the _one_ thing that’s not on the list we’re getting, and that’s final.”

Abed nodded. He knelt down and found the tag for his recliner. The boy joined them after a moment with his recliner’s information. He knelt beside his son and jotted down the information on the tag to find it later. 

With that settled, they walked over to the couches. The two continued their shenanigans on the various other rooms they passed, breaking character only to vote upon the options that Gobi found while they played that fit the foyer’s dimensions. They settled on a comfortable navy blue couch with white stripes. 

They went through the next few sections like that, finding along the way a set of tall bookcases for Abed’s expansive DVD collection, a bureau to place the TV in front of the recliners, and two tables—one to go in front of the couch, and one for them to eat in. They were halfway through Gobi’s list with no complaints from the two beyond the colors and textures of the various pieces when they arrived at the section of the store dedicated to bedroom furniture. Gobi did not notice that Troy and Abed ignored the showroom emulating a whole house near the mattresses in favor of walking the aisles of bed bases together, hunting for a particular type of structure. If he had, he would have known he and the boys had vastly different plans for their sleeping arrangements.

He was surprised when they called him over before he had found a bed he liked for Abed and pointed at a mahogany bunk by a corner dressed in emerald sheets. He stared at them, dumbfounded, waiting for an explanation. A moment passed between the three men standing around the bunk bed, right at the gated entrance to the children’s section of the top floor, without words being exchanged.

“The apartment has two bedrooms,” Gobi said finally. It was far from his first reaction, but his confusion and concern remained unspoken because he, unlike the two, was too self-conscious to speak his mind out loud. 

“It does, Mr. Nadir, but we’re transforming one of them into a playroom, so we're gonna share the other," the boy explained, his eyes gleaming with excitement, unfazed by the long silence before the conversation had resumed which Gobi could only characterize as awkward. Abed nodded in agreement. 

They had apparently already reached a consensus in support of this model because the boy started jotting down its information. Gobi took his son's arm and led him far away enough that they could talk in private. They stood shrouded in an alcove of sheets varying wildly in thread count. Abed felt one whose packaging was partially opened by another customer, delighting in the softness of the fabric.

"Ya baba," he said, receiving a brief moment of eye contact from Abed as an acknowledgment, "you ask too much from that boy."

"It was Troy's idea," he replied in his father's native Arabic, continuing the conversation in the language it had started. Though his son nearly always spoke in a monotone voice, he recognized the gentleness with which he addressed him as only one who loved him could. "Baba, trust me.”

“Now you’re asking too much from _me_.” He chuckled, but Gobi knew they both understood a part of him meant what he said despite Abed’s trouble with reading between the lines. Even so, his son gave him a small smile.

“You raised me well. Trust that.”

“You’re a good boy, Abed,” he whispered as he held his hand out near his shoulder tentatively. His son took his hand and placed it against the jutting bone—he’d always been such a skeletal boy—consenting to the touch in the way they’d devised in his youth. “I’m just looking out for you.”

“He is, too,” he responded, though whether he meant that as an answer to his first or second statement, he did not clarify. Perhaps he meant it for both. He turned toward Troy, who was approaching them with his pencil waving in the air. “You don’t have to worry. We take care of each other. You’re not alone anymore.”

Abed squeezed his hand before lifting it gently off his shoulder, picked up the sheet pack he had been testing, then went to Troy’s side to show it to him. Gobi froze in place, shocked by his son’s words. _He_ wasn’t alone? The boy was Abed’s friend, not his. The boy was the ending to the years that he had spent misunderstood and ostracized. He was nothing to Gobi without the connection to his son.

It took him a moment of examining the queen and king mattresses around him to realize Abed was referring to his mother. He had always been so perceptive. He could not communicate it until he’d made that film for his class, but his son recognized the toll that raising him had taken on both his parents. He must have noticed how much he’d struggled to care for him alone after she left—the pain it brought him to fish him out of school lockers, the headaches he got from when he stayed awake soothing his screams, the fear that forced him to drag him to psychologists and psychiatrists, the love from which sprang the various methods he’d created to connect in ways Abed understood.

Looking at his son’s hand on Troy’s own, comfortable and relaxed and _vulnerable_ in a way he’d never seen him be with anyone else, he realized the meaning of his claim. Gobi wasn’t the only person willing to find ways to love Abed as he was anymore.

He wasn’t alone.

Gobi walked toward the boys. They both liked the sheets. Troy handed them to him to place in the bag, but Gobi stopped him. “Actually, could you help me with the bag? It’s getting heavy.”

Troy beamed. “Sure thing, Mr. Nadir.” He took it and placed the sheet pack in a small pocket between their other items. He gave him a small smile. Perhaps this boy shared more than his impulsivity with his son. Perhaps he understood the gesture meant more than he was willing to admit out loud.

They went through the children’s section fairly quickly. Abed commented on the bright color palettes of the fabrics and Troy considered getting a stuffed animal—”Look at its eyes, Abed! I can’t just _leave_ it here!” he exclaimed in an attempt to convince him after Gobi had told him no, to no avail since Abed called the dinosaur plush the Ark of the Covenant before hurriedly walking away—but their bag was no heavier when they reached the stairs that led to the ground floor of the store.

The marketplace had no showrooms to speak of, so the boys entertained themselves by guessing the meaning of the names of the various products, escalating from reasonable and related terms to outlandish ideas. They gathered dinnerware and curtains along with Gobi, taking a more active role in gathering their purchases now. They were nearly done with their list when Troy noticed a lamp near the far end of the lighting section. 

Rendered speechless by its glory, he tapped at Abed’s arm repeatedly until he stopped looking at the tape he was getting to decorate the walls of the playroom—as of yet untitled, but he’d experimentally coined the word Dreamatorium, which was growing on him—and saw it, too.

Their silence after they’d been laughing and calling out seemingly random words for the past ten minutes alerted Gobi to the new development—mostly because he’d been following their guesses and gauging their possibilities, though he’d never admit it out loud. He stopped counting the boxes to organize the boys’ closets and found the two worshipping at the feet of a white and copper lamp, cut apart like a jigsaw puzzle.

“Do you see it?” Troy whispered as he stared up at the light fixture.

Abed nodded. “It’s the Death Star.”

“No,” Gobi said, already knowing what they were thinking. “Abed, we agreed the only extra objects we were getting were the recliners,” he said to his son, ignoring the confused look from the other.

“It’s the Death Star,” Abed repeated, his face and voice strained just enough to seem pleading. “The _Death Star_ , Baba.”

Troy leaned out from his son’s side with his hands folded in prayer on his chest and his eyes brimming with tears.

Gobi crossed his arms. “The recliners or the lamp. You choose,” he declared, unmoved by their pleas. They were dangerously close to the top of their budget. Even if they weren’t, a $130 lamp was a waste of money. 

And wasn’t the Death Star black? He was pretty sure it wasn’t white, at least. 

He finished counting the boxes to give them space to discuss their decision. When he brought them to the bag, they told him they preferred the recliners. With that, he moved toward the wall decorations section to get the hundreds of frames the boys needed to hang all their pictures together. As they walked, both Troy and Abed turned around and dramatically reached for the lamp, prompting a chuckle from Gobi he tried to hide with a cough. “Someday,” Abed whispered. They turned the corner, and the Death Star lamp was seemingly forgotten.

Once they’d collected one of every frame in the store, they made their way to the self-serve to find the boxes for their furniture. The three men found and collected most with no problem, though Troy misread his own handwriting more than a few times, leading them on wild goose chases that Gobi found himself, to his surprise, enjoying along with the boys. Eventually, once they’d figured out the locations of all the furniture they’d chosen, they went onto the check-out—Troy carrying the big blue bag and Abed pushing the long cart with the various boxes.

“Oh! Are those cinnamon rolls?” Troy asked suddenly, startling Gobi. The three turned to the side of the check-out aisle they were on where an assortment of chocolates and sweets were stacked on top of each other. A large plastic box with six glazed buns gleamed at the top.

They were closest to Gobi. Before the boys had time to beg or bargain, he leaned over and took hold of the box. He gave it to Troy to place in the bag with a small smile. He took it as he mouthed thank you. Abed gave the two an appreciative thumbs up.

Once Gobi had paid and the three had arranged all they had bought into the cart, they made their way to the car. The boys walked ahead, laughing and chattering. Gobi smiled. All his struggles to raise Abed were rewarded in that IKEA parking lot, seeing his son joyful and understood and loved by a friend—and a good one, at that. He relished in the sight, committing it to memory.

This had been a long, long trip—as he’d predicted—but he wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.

Then he remembered they still had to assemble all the furniture they bought, and a tired groan escaped him.

Troy turned toward him with a cinnamon roll in hand. He and Abed had already opened the box and taken one to share. “You want one, Mr. Nadir?”

“Call me Gobi,” he said as he took the sweet and bit into it. 

If this trip was anything to go by, the assembling wouldn’t be that bad after all.

**Author's Note:**

> For all those who might be curious, this is the lamp I'm describing in the story: https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/ikea-ps-2014-pendant-lamp-white-copper-color-30311492/


End file.
